Citadel
by Winged Lady Colette
Summary: Starfire always had a fear of the Citadel in the back of her mind since she found her way to Earth, but when the Titans crash land in an accident and she's kidnapped, brought to the Citadel to be sold to the Treverse, she learns to fear something else above all else. Saren and the Reapers.


**Author's Note: So, same with the other story, this isn't new, it was just on the other account that I couldn't give time to. I moved it over here so that I could give it more of the attention that it deserved. So, let me know what you all think! Enjoy!**

 **Disclaimer: I own nothing!**

 **Warning: Somewhat child slavery, OOCness, Unbeta'd.**

 **Word Count: 4,245**

It was an emergency that brought Starfire back to Tamaran. Galfor had sent a message to Jump City requesting that Starfire and the Titans come to Tamaran to deal with the situation. Starfire was terrified, worried that something had happened to her beloved Knorfka. That he was sick or hurt. Or that her home planet was being attacked by Drenthax for real this time, or something. Perhaps Galfor managed to get Eranian Measles and didn't have long to live.

Just thinking about it made Starfire's head spin and further assist in her getting on the especially easily frazzled nerves of their blue cloaked friend.

More than once, Raven has tried to calm the upset red head with her monotone and slightly strained voice. Starfire just could not be settled until they made it to Tamaran to find that the emergency wasn't anything to be concerned over. In fact, it was a surprise for Starfire, some Tamaranian holiday that didn't make any sense to the fellow Titans but they were willing to go along with it because it made Starfire happy. They had been so busy until recently that she had actually forgotten about it. Besides, everything was relatively peaceful now at Jump City so they could be away for a few days without worry.

And other than that, they could all use a break after the hassle they had in Tokyo a few weeks ago, they could all use a vacation.

So they stay and enjoy the festivities before they begin to make their way back home. It was on their way back that they came across a space storm. It wasn't anything too out of the ordinary - originally.

"Yo," Cyborg says, squinting at the lightning storm in front of them, already tilting the T-ship to avoid going into it. "Y'all see that storm?"

"Yeah, you'd have to be blind not to, Cy," Beast Boy says, rolling his eyes.

Cyborg glares over at his best friend for a moment before looking back over at the storm. "No, BB, listen. Does it look like there is something inside that storm, or is it just me?"

Robin, at the helm, narrows his eyes, staring into the storm with a critical look in his eye. There was a moment of silence, as he tries to study what was in front of him, before his forehead smoothes out.

Beast Boy's dark green eyebrows pull together tightly, looking around worried. "Uh, hey dudes? I've got a bad feeling about this..."

"I agree with Beast Boy," Starfire says softly, emerald green eyes wide. "I also have the bad feelings about this situation."

"Robin..." Raven says slowly, purple eyes sliding toward the back of the black haired boy's head. Her eyes flicker over to the storm, frowning deeply. She too, had a very bad feeling. Against the shadow cast by the lightning, she could see what could be mistaken as a shape within the cloud. Raven has seen a lot in her short life and had to travel quite some way from Azarath to get to Earth, but she has never seen something like that. It left her feeling uneasy.

"I think there is something in there," Beast Boy says. "I think I see it."

"Robin?" Starfire says softly, green eyes growing wider with worry when their leader had yet to address the issue. "Robin, what should we do?" No response. "Robin? Are you alright?"

Raven's eyes narrow as she stares into the cloud, reaching out with her mind, slowly, tentatively. It's then that she feels it. There is definitely something there, in the cloud, and it's calling out to them, like a siren. But it's not really working on any of them - - except for Robin. His mind is completely ensnared by the call. Raven's eyes widen and she leans forward in her seat.

"Robin!" She calls out right as Robin twists the flight handles of the T-ship toward the cloud. The rest of the Titans let out howls of fear, eyes widening in terror as they grow closer to the storm, lightning dancing around the borders of the ship. The alarms in the T-ship start going off and that seems to be what pulls Robin from the mind control that he was under long enough for him to try and swerve them out of the way before a gigantic maw opens up and tries to eat them.

Everything begins happening in a blur, there is loud, screeching alarms. All of the Titans are trying to gain control of the T-ship but it was going haywire. They are getting caught in the electric field and Cyborg is yelling out commands but they could barely hear over one another.

Starfire's green eyes are reflected back at her from her window as the lightning surrounding the T-ship grows in power. More and more until they are engulfed in the light. Starfire was absolutely terrified, unable to say anything as the shaking that took over the ship became more and more erratic. Starfire wanted so badly to call out to her friends, to have them give her the reassurance she so desperately needs right now, but she also knows that they can't. There is bigger things going on than making sure that Starfire is stable, emotionally.

She can only hope and pray that her friends and her are okay.

Somehting hits them hard and the side of Starfire's head slams into the glass. The first time dazed her. The second time made her vision blacken for a moment and the last one knocked her out completely.

When Starfire came to again, it was only for a few moments, watching as the T-ship around her set aflame as it hurdles toward the ground, closer and closer and closer and until the ground is right there. The next impact knocks her out again.

Flashes. Hazy images. Someone pulls her from the T-ship. She's hurt. Her entire body is throbbing in pain, especially her head. It blurs her vision and makes it hard for her to concentrate. She keeps fading in and out of consciousness as they pull her from the wreckage, they speak to her but either she's too out of it to be able to understand what they are saying or they aren't speaking a language that she understands.

Either way, that's no good.

She remembers someone wrapping something around her neck and head, there was something thick, like a bar, placed against her leg and arm and was basically tied to her limbs. Everything around her was just so bright, all the time. She could barely open her eyes for a few moments without being blinded and hurt by the light.

Starfire wanted nothing more than to roll onto her side, into her own bed with her silken purple sheets and soft comforter, wrap her arms around her adorable Silkie and sleep for an entire earth cycle. Then, maybe, she will be able to deal with whatever it is that is going on with her.

Then she remembers. She remembers something that she knew she shouldn't have forgotten. She remembers Robin. She remembers Beast Boy and Raven. She remembers Cyborg. She remembers the storm, how Robin wasn't responding. She remembers them turning into the storm and getting dangerously closer before Robin came to his senses. She remembers the mouth, the monster.

They must have crashed onto another planet. She wasn't too worried about her self, she could survive the vacuum of space, but her other friends she wasn't so sure of. She knew that Robin and Cyborg and Beast Boy weren't going to be as lucky in the expanse of space, but she wasn't sure about Raven, her friend being a half-demon, she didn't know what Raven could survive.

"R-Robin..." Starfire whispers, her voice hoarse. Her throat is dry and her head is aching. "Raven...Cybrog... Beast..." Her eyes roll up into her head as she blacks out again. She didn't care what happened to her. Anything could happen and she wouldn't even bat an eyelash. All she cares about is saving her friends. Saving her boyfriend and returning home, where they all belong.

* * *

Starfire was mad. She was so mad she didn't know how to think rationally. She knew that she had to think rationally in order to get out of there, but she couldn't. She could only think about where she was. She could only think about how she was kidnapped again. How it wasn't her friends that pulled her from the wreckage but someone else entirely and while she slept they sold her.

They sold her to the one place that she didn't want to go. They sold her to the Citadel. After everything she's been through since the beginning. She was captured, yet again, and sold to the Citadel. This was the one place in the entire universe that she didn't want to be and here she is. And no matter how mad that made her, no matter how helpless it made her feel, she cared more about her friends.

All of her friends were unique.

Beast Boy was green and could shape shift into any and all animals that he comes across. He was funny and versatile. Cyborg was half machine and was one of the smartest people that Starfire knew. It felt like he always had the answers. Robin was extraordinary. He was a normal human but with grossly abnormal abilities. He was smart and strong and more clever than anyone she had ever met. She's never met someone more loyal or brave. Raven was a half-demon. She had amazing powers that not even Starfire really understood.

But Starfire didn't need to understand. Raven was her friend, that was all there was to it.

If, by chance, they were captured like Starfire was, she was terrified to imagine what could be happening to them. Her friends were some of the most amazing people she's ever met. Those that wished to sell her to the Citadel wouldn't hesitate for a single moment in selling her friends there as well. And her friends were a lot more extraordinary to these people. They are unique.

"Let me out!" Starfire yells, glaring daggers at the creature before her. She never knew what they were. Aliens of the Citadel hardly travel within a hundred plinthors of Tamaran. They used to call the Tamaranians a foolish, ignorant and barbaric race. They were not ready to join the galactic community. Well, that was what they wanted to say, but they really had no choice. Unlike most of the other known species in the universe that are highly intellectual and top of the food chain on their planet, Tamaranians can fly. They weren't bound to their planet in a way that pretty much all of the others were.

They didn't need ships to travel between worlds, they could just fly from place to place without things as petty as waiting for a ship to be available or going to random planets on their way to their destination. Such things don't matter to the Tamaranians.

Once, when Starfire was a little, she remembered hearing one of these strange alieans on her planet talking with Galfor. She and Blackfire were shooed off to their rooms but Blackfire, ever the troublemaker even as a child, coerced Starfire into following her back down into the meeting hall where Galfor had met with this strange alien.

She doesn't much remember what they looked like, she had to look through Blackfire's curtain of black hair, but she could remember what they used to say.

"Perhaps the... Tamaranian's," the alien says delicately, as if their words were holding a rabid grishnik just inches from their face, "are not prepared to be uplifted."

They had been talking for a while before Blackfire and Starfire made it down there so Starfire was a bit lost as to what they were talking about. What did they mean, uplifted? Like flying? Starfire knew how to fly! Why would she need their help in that?

Galfor lets out a gruff bark of a laugh, sounding as if he found this completely absurd. "Uplift? You are a stranger on our planet, blue one, we do not need to be uplifted by anything. Especially you. We don't need to be uplifted. We are not restrained like you. Go away now, the Tamaranians do not need your help. We do not need you."

"Yes..." the woman says and it's only then that Starfire realizes how... stranger her words are. She's speaking Tamaranian, but.. it sounds weird to Starfire. "All we want to talk about is the ore you have here."

"Ore?" Galfor says as if the words didn't make sense to him. "No, no. We do not want to sell. Out. Leave us be."

"Sir," the woman says slowly. "Perhaps we can take a moment to talk about-"

"No," Galfor says, shaking his head briskly. "No. We want nothing from you. Leave us now and do not return." He nods his head toward two of the guards and they move forward to escort the woman and her three friends, who Starfire thinks is also women, turn to follow. Blackfire spins around and vanishes around the corner, faster that Starfire has ever seen her move.

Starfire looks after her sister for a moment before looking back to see the woman staring down at her. She doesn't remember what the woman looks like, but she does remember the woman's eyes. They were whitest shade of green that Starfire has ever seen.

One of the guards noticed Starfire and stepped between them, murmuring softly in Tamaranian, "Go now, Princess Koriand'r. This is not the place for a little one."

Relieved not of been yelled at, Starfire turns and runs away as fast as she can, lest Galfor see her and she actually be in big trouble.

Starfire doesn't remember much else, but she was almost certain that these people were nothing like that woman that visited Tamaran all those years ago. These did not look to be women. If they were, they were very ugly.

These creatures had bulbus shaped heads with four eyes and multiple noses that were just holes in the face rather anything like her own. They had no hair and strange tube-like grows going from their noses down their cheeks on both sides of their mouth to the chin and neck before disappearing into the collar of their different colored armor.

Starfire's eyebrows pull together tightly. They were really horrible looking creatures. She didn't like the way that they stared at her. It makes her sick to her stomach whenever their four eyes turn her way.

A man walks in wearing nearly all white armor. He's human. The first human she's seen since she got here. Her eyebrows pull together even tighter in confusion. Since when did humans become part of the Citadel races? Starfire would never claim to be some kind of expert on the Citadel or it's races, but she felt like she would have known if humans became part of them. Robin would have told her. She mentioned how she was going to be sold to the Citadel when the first met. He definitely would have said something.

Unless... it has been so long as for him to forget. But that just didn't seem to be Robin. He didn't usually forget things. Well, not the important things, at least. Something just didn't add up.

One of the aliens, with a dark blue set of armor, says something to the human man. The noise is strange and foreign to Starfire. It's gurgled and scratchy and Starfire didn't like the sound of it.

The man's eyes flicker over to her. His eyes are a dark brown color, his skin caramel. The dim light gleams off the top of his bald head as he steps closer to the cell they have her locked into. He squints at her, as if he was seeing something - which he was.

"I don't know," the man says. "I don't know anything about teenagers. I couldn't tell you if this was normal or not."

"I understand you," Starfire says, green eyes wide. "Please, you must help me get out of here! I am not suppose to be here!"

The man sneers, shaking his head. "No, dear, you are right where you belong."

"No, I do not belong here," Starfire says, yanking at the chains that keeps her in place. It's a thick chain that wraps around her wrists with a blue... thing that Starfire couldn't identify holding the chains together. If she listened closely, she could hear a strange humming noise coming from it. She didn't know what it did but she wanted out of it as soon as possible.

"Well, you're right," the man says, giving her a wolfish grin. "You're being sold to a nice place out in the Traverse. Someone there wants you real bad, honey. They are paying big bucks for you."

Starfire's heart plummets into her feet. This wasn't her last stop. She was probably going to be separated further from her friends and her chances of reuniting with them begins to slip through his fingertips like water. There is no way she's going to let this happen.

"Please," Starfire says pleadingly. "Please, I must get out of here and find my friends."

The man shakes his head. "Darling, you don't have to worry about a thing."

"I do not believe you. Where will you be taking me?" Starfire asks, standing up slowly. Her knees creak a bit and ache from the way she's been sitting on the floor.

"You don't have to worry about a thing, darling. You're cute, I'll give you that, but I personally believe someone paid a hell of a lot more for you than what a little human girl like yourself is worth," the man says, then shrugs.

Starfire blinks slowly. "Human..." she says softly, her eyes lowering to the chains around her wrists. She's been feeling weak since she woke up. Any of the injuries she obtained in the crash have since been healed. Her healing is amazing in comparison to a human's but advanced medicine could also attribute to the heightened healing, which may have been where some of the confusion lies.

These people don't know anything. Or at least, they don't realize what is right in front of them. And it's certainly not a human.

* * *

Tali wrings her hands nervously in front of her, looking around aimlessly for somewhere to hide. She didn't know if the pounding in the back of her head was a headache or footsteps racing behind her but she didn't care to stick around and find out. Tali had managed to avoid Saren's men and make it to the Citadel safely, thus far. Now that she's here, she has to find somewhere safe, get a heaping dose of anti-biotics into her system before the alarms blaring in her ears drive her mad or the infection kills her.

She managed to patch up her suit already but the germs have already made it inside and while her suit was able to fight off most of it, she managed to get sick and now her life is in grave danger. Not just from Saren's men, either.

Tali ducks behind some crates, folding herself small until she can squeeze into a tight corner and manually shut down the alarms in her suit. She can feel herself starting to burn up but at least now she can have a moment to think and calm down her racing heart. This isn't bad. It's nothing that even simple medicine can't fix. She just needs to get her hands on it.

"Think, Tali, think," Tali mutters to herself under her breath. She shifts slightly and she feels her suit rub up against something metallic. She turns around slowly in the tight space to see a large vent opening. There is a light, flickering against the metal of the vent from somewhere else. It was a warm orange color. Tali tilts her head to the side, curiously.

The sound of voices off in the distance makes Tali hesitate before a split second decision crosses her mind and she goes for it. She unscrews the vent cover and crawls into it, not caring to close it behind herself, mildly confident that the crates will hide her long enough so that she can make her escape. This may be a stupid idea but she's got to go somewhere. She can't wait for Saren and his men to get to her.

As stealthily as she can, and it's not easy in a suit, she's banged her head against the top of the vent a few times, pausing at the loud echo. No one comes screaming, so she keeps moving, toward the orange glow, hoping against hope that it will be someone who is willing to help her. Or, at least, be willing to point her toward a clinic that she can get assistance from before it's too late.

Tali's not sure how long she was clamoring through that vent but it was long enough for her to get light headed and her breathing to become ragged and wheezy. As she gets closer to the next vent opening, the warm orange light turns green. A bright, beautiful, vibrant green that Tali has only ever seen on the few planets that she has ever visited. It was a beautiful color that she thought she would one day see on Rannok.

Tali crawls through the vent to the opening but a crate to the right of the opening prevents her from seeing anything in the room, but she can see the green light and now she can hear people yelling. The green lights begin to flicker and there is a woman growling.

"Dove fairn machnat!" She snarls and there is tiny explosions with a weird whistling noise. Tali pushes open the gate and slowly crawls out, keeping behind the cover of the crate, she catches the last moment of a green ball of light slamming into the face of a human man before the light goes away. The only other person left standing in the room is a girl, human, by the looks of it.

The girl brings her chained hands up and pulls them apart, letting out an angry growl from the strain before the metal bends and yields to her strength, releasing her from her binds. She takes a moment to remove all of the chains before stepping up to the bars of her cage, grabbing at two of the closest to her and pulling them apart with another growl.

She steps out and wiggles her ankles around, as if she's been sitting on them for too long and they've fallen asleep. She looks around the room for a moment, as if suddenly misplaced. The angry look on her face melts away from childish innocence and confusion. Tali is almost certain she's come across some sort of illegal activity that this girl managed to somehow free herself from.

Tali blinks slowly, her vision blurring as the throbbing in her head grows too intense.

She doesn't have time to worry about who this girl was or what exactly was going on. She needed help. She needed it now.

Tali steps out from behind the crate, stumbling a bit, which draws the girl's attention. The girl lowers slightly into an attack position before she seem to notice that Tali was in no shape to fight back.

"Bart meh? Huh? Bart meh?" The girl calls out to Tali slowly, her voice no longer that angry, animalistic growl. It's... kind sounding. With a hint of suspicion. "Gorshi yat gorf nuh?"

Tali shakes her head slowly. "I do not know what you are saying..." Tali says, trying to look up at the girl in front of her, but her vision is blurring too badly for her to be able to tell what she sees. "Please! I need a doctor! Please!" She takes a shaky step closer to the girl.

After a moment of hesitation, the girl steps closer. And then another step and then another, until she's right by Tali's side, placing a gentle hand on the quarian's shoulder.

"Are..." the girl says softly, "Are you okay?"

Tali perks a bit. "That is the human tongue. I understand you. Please, please, I need a doctor."

"I..." the girl says slowly, "don't understand you. Are you sick? Do you need help?"

"Yes!" Tali says, before pausing a moment and shaking her head, not caring how it rattles her brain. "I... I need..." Tali's eyes roll up into the back of her head and she falls into the girl's arms, passing out completely.


End file.
